Dear Fourth Grade Families,I hope everyone has had a great week! Next Friday, we will be participating in the Halloween parade and having a small party after. The students were talking about what they were going to be for Halloween during morning meeting, it is always exciting to see what their interests. Fourth graders do not have to dress up for the parade, but I encouraged them to get into the spirit and enjoy the fun!

In reading we started our non-fiction unit. We started with some basic skills about preparing to read non-fiction text. It is important that students think about why they want to learn about this topic and pushing themselves to find a reason to care if it isn’t obvious at first. Students should also be looking at the text features to prepare their minds for what they think they will learn. A big component of non-fiction is the text structure. It is important that students are able to recognize the structure that the author has chosen before beginning to read and take notes.

In writing students have selected a thesis that was born out of opinions of people, places and objects. Students were asked to find three supporting, yet distinct reasons that support their opinion. We are working on developing evidence to support their thesis statements. In writing we also investigated the basic structure of essay writing. This framework will serve as a starting place for writing a traditional essay.

In math we have been using our multiplication and division skills to solve multi-step problems. I am extremely impressed with the students ability understand difficult problems. Thank you to all of those who supported your child with the additional math homework assignment. It is great to see the support at home.​Next Wednesday and Thursday will be minimum days for the students because of parent-teacher conferences. Attached you will find the updated conference times.Thank you